The Passion: After Beauty and Truth are Put To Death
I wanted you to see this poem… it’s last lines tell of dying from pursuing truth and beauty in culture, in life… inferring an exhaustion sets in, one loses energy eventually… and dies not from glut of truth or beauty, but for want of them.
There is more. Each reader will find their own thought somewhere in this poem, I think.
by Emily Dickenson
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth – the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
In the never-ending cycle that truly exists in each of us, in each institution, in each nation, and in Nature… it is painfully true… beauty and truth are put to death on a regular basis.
Yet, there is an additional episode to loving and dying for truth and beauty, that is not written into this beautiful poem. There is more than mouldering in the grave until one’s name, one’s voice, are erased by time. Far more.
The next episode of the never-ending cycle is written into the animating spirit of each person downed and dead by want of cleaner, clearer Light… those who want no dark half-truths hidden in linted pockets inside Saville Row suits, no half-lies shined up to look like the truth, no rotten tooth painted over with gold paint, and no falsehoods paid with bags of gold to be written into death-dealing laws. The longings of the lovers of Truth and Beauty are longings for the undousable Light.
Yet in every time, and in our time, when truth and beauty are in the mausoleum, each person’s animating spirit, if one doesnt put a rock atop it with heavy cynicism and unrelieved scorn (often in order to try to dull the heartaches of the disappointed idealist)… the animating spirit comes roaring back right out of the grave… even at the merest intimation of a holier Truth winning even one of its cases per day, per week, per year. The prison door swings open. The eyes blink at the Light; the heart flares with most fierce fire.
The tiniest evidence of life anew causes the animating spirit to sit up and flash its brilliant light again. It has found a way into the field again. Scarred, yes. Wholly. And. Still aflame: Incandescent. That would be us.
For many of us, this season is Easter and Passover, and for those who follow a different pathway than a religious one, it is a time when the juice of new animation in oneself can be felt surging upward with the longer hours of light.
For many, this surge of new life follows a long time of fasting and examination about how we are living in or outside the other-worldly Circle of Truth and Beauty. Now, comes the time this week, on Good Friday for Christians, for seder Passover and its utter cleanliness of the house doing away with any contaminant, and for those who run outdoors wanting to face into the sweet fresh wind… there is memory of the colossal death of the most beloved Truth and Beauty, the capture, during the cold of winter with its seeming scorn of us, mockery and isolation… that were followed by days of our plummeting into the graves that await us, have always been awaiting us, will always in cycle, be waiting for us…
for being imprisoned in dead ideas and deadened spirit are the midway point in the psyche’s brilliant cycle of transformation of the dark night back into the Light.
Yet somewhere in this cycle in what some call Springtime, by ancient words and songs and just a feeling of ‘lightness of being’ suddenly, we will be called out of the dead and dark. Released one more time. This is the ancient cycle.
And we will thence try to learn to live more awakened even with the usual tics and tricks of mind in ourselves. We plot how we can fan our gifts, how we can earnestly try to follow, no matter how imperfectly, that One we call, amongst many names, Truth and Beauty. The One who called himself Light of the World. The one who oversaw the flight from all of Pharaoh’s tricks which we already know all too well. The brack and dry of the wintering over with not enough sunlight.
And we will ask ourselves how we can find ways to stand with our Teacher whosoever he or she may be—and the teachings of the Teacher– in ways that have effect, whether we can see it in ourselves, in our worlds, immediately or not. This is a time of do-overs and new starts, and redrawing lines.
You, dear soul, have your part of the master-cycle of death and roaring back to life too. In our own ways, we all do. Like flowers feeling sunlight through the thick blanket of dirt over their rhizomes, we quicken too, even against our wills. We do. Some will be tiny buds opening cheek to cheek close to the ground, and others will be showy displays waving high above ground. But all will thrive anew in the light.
Yes, The Grave, the enslavement, the being held against one’s will by those who have no sense and no heart. I don’t apprehend it all, but know for certain that even if and particularly when we ‘feel dead’ or deadened, we are dead in some way, it is true… but we are also only ‘sleeping the sleep of the dead,’ and often this sleep is ‘rest and regrouping’ in another sense entirely.
I’ve been in the grave many times. I know you have also. We do “talk between the rooms,” yes. We tell the tales of how we are dying each day and how we finally died. Yet, this ‘talking between rooms,’ is how we know animating spirit is able to rush back into being with even the merest opening we find in the crack in the cell wall, in the rolling away of the boulder from the opening to the hand hewn cave, in the dividing of the sea, in the fresh air on our faces.
One day we are in the grave ‘talking between rooms,’ and the next, all of a sudden whomsoever we were speaking to… is suddenly … gone. And risen. And it is us who has gone. It is us who is risen. And the Source without source somewhere abounds in us. Free again.
that is all Ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know.
John Keats
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Coda: themoderatevoice